Imam’s Killer Is Sentenced, but Motive Remains a Mystery

When an imam and his assistant were gunned down on a Queens street two summers ago, investigators and members of the largely Bangladeshi Muslim community who followed the spiritual leaders were left grasping for answers.

Detectives arrested a suspect, Oscar Morel, and found a pistol hidden inside a wall in his Brooklyn kitchen that they said matched the one used in the shooting, but they offered no motive for the crime.

The midday attack on the quiet scholars — Maulana Alauddin Akonjee, 55, and his assistant, Thara Uddin, 64 — was not cast as a hate crime, robbery or crime of passion during a nearly three-week trial that ended on March 23 with the conviction of Mr. Morel for first-degree and second-degree murder.

So as Mr. Morel, 37, was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison without chance of parole, an explanation for the execution-style killings remained elusive.

“There’s no ostensible, obvious motive here, nor did I prove a motive at the trial,” Peter V. Lomp, the prosecutor who tried the case, said before Mr. Morel was sentenced in State Supreme Court in Queens.

“I had very strong evidence that he was guilty and I specifically attempted to divert the jury’s attention from the motive issue,” Mr. Lomp said. “I told them from the very beginning: ‘If you focus on motive, you probably won’t reach a verdict, because you’re not going to figure out why.’ Nor do I have to prove why.”

Michael Jay Schwed, Mr. Morel’s court-appointed lawyer, said the absence of a motive is one of several troubling factors in a case built on circumstantial evidence that he said would undoubtedly be appealed.

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Imam Maulama Akonjee, 55, was gunned down as he walked from services in Ozone Park, Queens, in 2016.Credit

Mr. Schwed said the prosecution produced no one who claimed to have seen Mr. Morel shoot the victims. The .38-caliber revolver used in the shooting, and found in his client’s apartment, was not definitively linked to Mr. Morel, he said.

“There’s no proof that he’s the shooter,” Mr. Schwed said, adding that witnesses were unable to pick him out in lineups. “There’s proof he has the gun that the shooter used, if you want to accept that, that it wasn’t planted. But that doesn’t mean he’s the shooter. It could mean he’s hiding it for the shooter.”

Of his client, Mr. Schwed added, “When he speaks to me, I get the sincerity of his claim that he didn’t do it.”

Before the sentencing, the sons of both victims delivered statements to the court, saying they had one question for Mr. Morel: Why? Minutes later, Justice Gregory L. Lasak asked the same question: “Do you want to tell me why you shot these two men, Mr. Morel? Do you wish to answer the question of the two men’s sons?”

Mr. Morel, dressed in a gray suit, his hands folded on the table in front of him, said, “I’m innocent, your honor.”

On the benches behind him, Mr. Morel’s mother, Ana, looked on, crying. Three rows of seats on the other side were filled with friends and relatives of the victims.

“You’re going to be haunted by what you did,” Justice Lasak said. “It may not hit you right away, but day after day, year after year, you’re going to be up behind those cold steel bars and concrete walls of the New York State prison and you’re going to have to deal with this in your own conscience.”

The shootings, shortly before 2 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2016, punctured a steamy summer day in a working-class area of Ozone Park, a growing hub of Muslim families, and occurred during a wave of anti-Muslim hostility across the country.

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Community members gathered at the scene of the murders in 2016.CreditDave Sanders for the New York Times

Mr. Akonjee and Mr. Uddin, dressed in religious garb, were walking from a prayer service at the local mosque, Al-Furqan Jame Masjid, on Glenmore Avenue. (The men were also sometimes referred to as Alauddin Akonjee and Thara Miah.)

Each had lived in the neighborhood for about four years, prosecutors said, and investigators came to believe that the gunman, dressed in a dark polo shirt and shorts, stalked them to the corner of Liberty Avenue and 79th Street and opened fire from behind, hitting Mr. Akonjee four times and Mr. Uddin once. Both men were taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where they died.

By evening, hundreds of residents were rallying at the scene of the shooting to denounce the killings and discuss their fears about an act of violence based on race or religion.

“It’s a very rare thing to see a cleric killed, and the Muslim community has already been on edge,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said two days later.

By then, investigators had followed a trail of clues that led them to Mr. Morel in his apartment in East New York, Brooklyn — a home Mr. Lomp said he had moved into about 10 months earlier after living for two decades on Rockaway Boulevard, “very close” to where the shootings occurred.

Several snippets of surveillance footage quickly aided the inquiry. Two showed the shooting. In other parts of the footage, investigators were able to see the attacker climb into a car, a Chevrolet Trailblazer, and drive away. Additional video showed the Trailblazer involved in a nearby hit and run of a bicyclist, at Pine Street and Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn. A witness followed the vehicle and gave police its license plate number: FYY 4983.

Investigators found the vehicle parked on the street in East New York, and they waited for the driver to return, the police said. A day after the shooting, police said a man, later identified as Mr. Morel, got into it, then rammed a police vehicle as he tried to flee. Mr. Morel was arrested and a search warrant for his home was executed the following night.

Mr. Morel, a former maintenance worker at The New School, did not testify during his trial. He had lived alone in his apartment, where investigators found a hole in a kitchen wall behind a calendar. It was in that void that police said they found a blue bag containing a .38-caliber revolver, 58 bullets and a T-shirt wrapped around five spent shell casings, which ballistics tests matched to the gun and the two bullets taken from the victims’ bodies.